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European Review of History Ð Revue europ eÂenne d’Histoire , Vol. 7, N o. 1, 2000

Embodying Citizenship: Corporeality and Civility inEarly Modernity

Citizenship, Modernity And The Embodiment Of Civility

Contemporary sociological discussions of late or postmodern citizenship have tended to ignore the

consequences of signi®cant historical changes in a continuing tendency to explain citizenship in

term s of wh at Ro che1

has called `national functionalist or gene ral na tion-stat ist assumptions ¼ of

the existence and perm anence, integrity and co mprehensivene ss of national states and nation-state

based societies.’ The passing of the era of nineteenth and twentieth century western nation- and

empire-building has generated a problematic con®guration of `post-national’ factors which can be

interpreted as affecting the rights, identity and membership conditions of citizenship in a variety

of ways, all of which increase the diversity of manifestations of citizenship as a version of socialand political identity. This, in turn, may be considered as yet further evidence of what Habermas

ha s referred to as the incomplete pr oject of mod ernity, formulated by enligh tenment philosophers

to pr ovide a universal, cognitiv e ep ist emolog ical basis for the ratio nal organization of everyday

life.2

Th e continui ng incompletenes s of the project resu lts, in part, from the em pirical unre alisabil-

ity of i ts ambitions for cognitive epistemological universalism, which took the form of

correspondential communication and objective rationality. The possibility of achieving either of

these go als continue s to be subv erted by the char acter of human corpore ali ty. Th e kinesic and

pa ralinguistic as pects of bodily activity wh ich contextu alise speech make correspo ndence of

intention and meaning in verbal language impossible; and the conceptual signi®cance of objective

rationality is constantly quali®ed by its literal embodiment in sensual experience. Social action i s

po ssible only in and by control of the bo dy, through ha rnessing and directing to meaning ful/ratio-

na l purposes its instincts, de sires, drives and po wers.

The body as both a mode of and a context for communication and expression has ne cess arily

been a continuing preoccupation throughout the history of Western modernity, since it is through

the body as a substant ive ph enomenon and as a symbolic resource that the ethos of new

interactional orders may be observed as they emerge and before they are fully articulated verbally,

and hence made identi®able in terms of their institutional structures. The recurrent signi®cance of

the threat to social and political order of the crowd testi®e s to the problem of unruly bo dies: as

mob and, more recently, mass the crowd is used to represent the embodiment of social and

po lit ical unrest within an existing order. Particular formulations of the crow d provide mod els to

challenge societal orders organized in terms of other structural collectivities: barbarian primitives

threaten imperial city states, tribal hordes threaten feudal estates, mobs thre aten elites, masses

threaten classes. Instances of mob riot and revo lt, mass insu rrection an d revolutio n are us ed to

demarcate the succession of epochs and regimes in European history from the thirteenth century.3

Th e historica l pe riod isation of Eu ropean moder nity itself, from the early modernity of the ®fteenth

to the seve nteenth centurie s, the En lightenmen t modernity of the eighteenth and nineteent h

centuries and the late modernity of the mid-twentieth century can be accomplished in terms of

collectivities of unruly bodies. The key to bringing these collectivities back to rule, and thussustaining or restoring social and political order is to re-order the individual body; hence the

importance of the manner in which citizenship is embodied in early modernity.

Attempts were made in northern Europe, from the sixteenth century onwards, to universalise

po lit ical identity through a co ncept of common membership of the nation states that had em erge d

during early modernity.4

Th e common identity of citizenship soug ht both to confer a uniform

1. M. Roche, `Review Article: Citizenship and Modernity’, British Journal of Sociology, 46 (1995) 4,

pp . 71 5± 33 , 717, 72 1.

2. J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge MA , 1987.

3. S. Giner, Mass Society, 1976; G. Le Bon, The Crowd , London , 1896; G. Rude, The Crowd in Hi story, 1968.

4. D. Heater, Citizenship: The C ivic Ideal in Wo rld History, Politics an d Education, London, 1990, pp. 25±27.

ISSN 1350-7486 print 1469-8293/00/010109-013 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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110 European Review of History Ð Rev ue europ eÂenne d’H istoire

status on all those entitled to be politically active, and thereby to ensure social cohesion by

pr oviding them wi th a shared object of loya lty which might override potential con¯ icts gene rated

by their divergent interests. That `post-national’ conditions have produced a resurgence of

differences and con¯icts in political interest, which require reconsideration of concepts of

citizenship and their application and operationalisation, suggests the potential worth of examining

the cond itions of the em ergence of citizenship in early mod ernity. As Ha berm as notes5

`With

varying content, the term `modern’ again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that

relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the

old to the new.’

Early modernity in Europe was a period of considerable and continuous transition. From the

fourteenth century onwards the consolidation of the new mercantilist economic order had gathered

momentum through accompanying political accommodations between the traditional military and

agrarian aristocracies and the newly emerging mercantile bourgeoisie that had begun to replace the

increasingly unstable social order precipitated by the c on¯icting loyalties of the second feudal

age.6

Against such a background of relatively rapid and radical change, the consequent physical

and social mobility, with its attendant experiences of cultural diversity inevitably produced severalways of integrating the modern individual into a new condition of societal membership, of which

what has been termed the theory of active citizenship was one.7

Elias: Civility And Early Modern Citizenship

How citizenship is to be embodied in any society is a fundamental aspect of the problem of social

order, and thus stands at the interface between sociology and politics. But part of the issue, as it

arises in early modern Europe, stems from the emergence of political individualism after the

breakdown of feudalism and, in particular, the increasingly urgent debate from the mid-sixteenth

century onwards of the right to depose a ruler.8

Because the embodiment of citizenship as social

and political identity requires a re-ordering of the individual body, it is central to the dialectic of

individual and society and thus becomes, for sociology, an issue of ontology. Elias provides a way

of addressing this in general sociological terms by pointing out that all societies have to ful®l a

set of elementary functions in order to survive. These include provision for material needs,

violence management and control, knowledge acquisition and transmission and a fourth, self-con-

trol, wh ich, in some respects, provides for the acco mplishme nt of all the others:

human beings ¼ ha ve no ¼ inborn restra ints. They must acquire the patterns of self-re-straint indispensable for social life through learning while living with others.

Accordingly, individual learning of a social pattern of self-restraint or a civilizing

proces s ¼ is ¼ one of the universal elem entary survival functions ¼ in ev ery human

group.9

Human beings accomplish self-regulation by re¯exively developing and re®ning skills of increas-

ing complexity and sophistication which can themselves be elaborated re¯exively to an extent that

is limited only by imagination and the abilities of people to negotiate common meanings. Elias

offers the learning and use of vocal language and the expression of the emotions as examples of

this.10

Both are essential to human communication and hence to sociality; and both are accom-

plished through skills of bo dily action and co ntrol. McN eill pr oposes a qu asi-evolu tionary

5. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 3.

6. G. Vowinckel, `Comm and or Re®ne? Cultural Patterns of Culturally Organizing Emotions’, Theory, Culture

& Society, 4 (1987) 2±3, pp. 489±514; 491±94.

7. Heater, Citizenship, p. 28.

8. Heater, Citizenship, p. 28.

9. N. Elias, `The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present’, Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (1987), 2±3, pp. 223±47;

230±31.10. N. Elias `On Human Beings and Their Emotions: A Process-Sociological Essay’, Theory, Culture & Society,

4 (1987), 2±3, pp. 339±61.


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Debates and Reviews Ð DeÂbat s et Re vue s 11 1

development and differentiation of levels of communication skills premised on the corporeal on

the grounds that

the muscular, rhythmic dimen sion of hu man sociality ¼ always has be en a powe rful

force at work in humankind ¼ Successive levels of communication Ð muscular and

gestural, then vocal and verbal, then written and mathematical Ð are what made Homo

sapiens the dominant species it has become.1 1

Th e mos t develope d originary form of muscular bo nding is to be found in the social danc ing of

a community, which arouses euphoric collective excitement in participants and onlookers. McNeill

claims that it is plausible to suppose that this `was essential to the on-going stability of village life,

upon which cities and all the works of civilization depended’.12

Th is places bodily activity as a

mode of expression and communication at the core of human sociality. As Crossley notes,1 3

the body possesses a synthetic and coordinating powe r in relation to itse lf ¼ by means

of its action in the world ¼ derived from a cultural stock ¼ acquired by means of

trai ning ¼ W hat is acqu ired ¼ is a ge nuine form of unde rstanding ¼ (which) co nsistsin competent bodily action ¼ an attribute of meaningful and embodied behaviour.

Th rough competent bo dily action, the individua l can br ing their body to a conditio n in wh ich

relations with other, comparably re¯exive embodied individuals can be sustained in ways stable

enough to make social and political order possible. This process is not necessarily explicable in

term s of societal determ ination, since it is a constitutive feature itself of the proc ess of

transfor ming society from a cond ition of rela tive instability into a new instit utio nal order. It

implies the necessity of the practical, bodily actions of individuals to the accomplishment of social

changes and of structures of social differentiation.

One important form in which these individual practical actions were concerted socially in earlymodernity was through social dancing.

1 4As Franko notes of Renaissance dance,

15`the physical

discipline required by the dance was in many ways indistinguishable from that required by

civility.’ This refers primarily to dancing at the courts of Renaissance rulers, but this, as were so

many courtly practices, was emulated widely by the new middle classes. And as it became

increasingly characteristic of bourgeois social practices, so it became less frequent at court as a

consequence of the need to sustain indices of demarcation of social status in the unstable

conditions of rapidly and signi®cantly changing social structures.16

It was not simply the occasions

on which social dances were performed, or by whom, but also the corporeal requirements of their

pe rform ance and the symbolic st ructures of the dances them se lves that we re impo rta nt features of their social and political signi®cance in early modernity. They epitomised the importance of the

controls required of the body by the new codes of civility and, in their ordering of the m ovements

of the bodies of the dancers, they symbolised the moral character of the emerging social order. In

effect, the social dance of early modernity embodied the codes of corporeal restraint that would

be required of all citizens by a `formalization of the civil act which makes the act no longer an

index of manners but a predicable ¼ (and) transforms conventional properties into essential

ones.’17

11. W. H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, Cambridge MA, 1995, p. 15 6.

12. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, pp. 13, 153±54.

13. N. C rossley, `M erleau-Ponty, the E lusive B ody and Carnal Sociology’, Body & Society, 1 (1995), 1,

pp . 43 ±6 3; 54 ±5 5.

14. N. Elias, The Cou rt Society, trans. Edward Jephcott, Oxford, 1983, pp. 11 0±16, 186±87; McNe ill, Keeping

Together in Time, pp. 132±33.

15. M. Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (ca. 1416±1589), Birmingham, Al., 1986,

p. 31 .

16. P. Filmer, `Embo diment and Civility in Ea rly Modernity: Aspects of Relations between Dance, the Body

and Sociocultural Change’, Body & Society, 5 (1999), 1, pp. 1±16; B. Sparti, `The Function and Status of Dancein the 15th Century Italian Courts’, Dance Research, 14 (1996), 1, pp. 42±61.

17. Franko, The Dancing Body, pp. 34±36.


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concentration and exercise of political power across Europe from the twelfth century onwards.23

Th eir hege mony began to break down in England in the ®rst half of the seventeenth ce ntury, but

lasted in France until the second half of the eighteenth century. Alongside these were the

economically powerful groups of an emerging middle class, the relatively paci®ed entrepreneurial

merchants whose mercantile activities produced and consolidated the new forms of wealth a nd

whose support and collaboration was essential to the maintenance of the political authority of the

courts. The processes of ennoblement and paci®cation operated respectively on these power groups

to make their different and pote ntially co n¯icting interests suf® cie ntly co mpatible with on e an other

to sustain social and po lit ical stab ility. And they we re linked in highly differentiated codes of

behaviour, to the construction and dissemination of which each group contributed. As centres of

po lit ical control and ad ministra tion, and of econo mic cons umption, the courts

had provided models and go als for the leading groups througho ut European societ y.

National bourgeois society is pre-dated by a pan-European courtly aristocratic society

which created those models of peaceful interaction responsible for civilizing the warriors

of medieval society, through manners which become `re®ned’ and `polished’. The

courtier, with his self-control and social skills ¼ came to be seen, eventually, as the very

epitome of the man of reason.24

The processes by which the courtly model comes to inform bo urgeois pr actice du ring early

modernity is a signi®cant feature of what Elias terms the civilizing process. The process itself is

a continuous feature of all human societies. Its progress through the history of western modernity

can be charted by changes in the relative signi®cance of the key terms through which it is

formulated in French Ð the dominant language of European court society from the sixteenth

century: Courto isie, civiliteÂ and civilisation.2 5

All of these processes are features of the enno-

blement of warriors and paci®cation of merchants, which are achieved through the increasinglywidespread imposition of controls on corporeal expressions of affect and their transformation into

the ps ychologically self-conscious and norm atively rational behaviour of polite social interacti on.26

Un derlying these chan ges were str uctural changes in the un derlying, systemic processes of the

social division of labour produced by the increasing diversi®cation of economic activity with the

advent of mercantilism, the increasing ef®ciency of agrarian production, and the growth of urban

ecology characteristic of later feudalism. The social and geographical mobility produced by these

changes was accompanied by an increasingly effective monopolisation of the means of physical

coercion and violence by the emergent forms of the state Ð a phenomenon well illustrated as early

as the twelfth century by the superseding of knightly armies of cavalry by armed infantry,

organised through military drill. McNeill reports on the defeat, in 1176, of `an imperial army of

German knights that recklessly charged the close-arrayed burghers’ pikes at Legnano’.27

Both codes of civility and the imposition of military drill have a similar effect on groups of

pe ople located in very different positions in the social and politic al hierarchies of early modernity.

In each case, there occurs a socialisation and rationalization of the physical expression of affect.

In court society this replaces the resolution of differences among the most powerful individuals by

ph ysical aggression, wi th mor e subtle and com plex differentiations premised up on the control and

internalization of affectual drives and their transformation into codes of interactional etiquette,

important features of which are invariably concerned with the re®nement and monitoring of

self-presentation. 28 At the other end of social hierarchy, military discipline created a new, if

arti®cial form of primary community for those who were displaced by, and became disaffected

from, the transition from agrarian to mercantile modes of production, in which `principles of

23. H. Kuzm ics, `Civilization, State and Bourgeois Society: The Theoretical Contribution of Norbert E lias’,

Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (1987), 2±3, pp. 515±35; p. 517.

24. Kuzmics, `Civilization, State and Bourgeois Society’, pp. 517±18.

25. Elias, The Court Society, and The Civilizing Process, pp. 83±85, 1777±78.

26. Kuzmics, `Civilization, State and Bourgeois Society’, pp. 518±19.27. Mcneill, `Keeping Together in Time, p. 122.

28. Elias, The Court Society, pp. 90±91, 231±32.


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command and subordination gave meaning and direction to life’,29

which was supported materially

by the provision of food, shelter and some monetary reward that came with membership of a

pr ofessional standing ar my. The differences between milita ry and court practices are those between

self-coercion and self-control and are manifest in the more elaborated practices of corporeal

containment characteristic of codes of courtly civility. The competition for social position at court

required individuals to develop ef®cient forms of self-control as `an important source of power.

Self-control is more likely to develop in privileged social spaces (which favour `strength’) than in

a tradition of routinized servitude.30

The civilizing processes involved begin with increa sing social ization of biolog ically natural

bodily functions and activities through the introduction and imposition of rules and prescriptions

for c ontrolling all forms of eructation, egestion and excretion. Alongside these are introduced

increasingly differentiated table manners, and other rules of micro-social interaction, governing

intimate relations, for example. The effect of these controls is to make physical activities and

behaviour more acceptable socially by requiring that performance of them should take more

speci®c and detailed account of the concerns and sensibilities of others. This is accompanied by

increases in the rationalization of the body, as conscious, rational re¯ection is used to further regulate the expression of affect, and the body is seen as an assembly of differentiated, yet

articulated parts, whose expressivity can be subjected to development through training in greater

control. The controls effected by socialization and rationalization become internalised through

being learnt, to the extent that automatic performance of them by individuals, whether or not in

social environments, is treated as a signi®cant index of social competence. This precipitates a

pr ocess of individualizati on of the em bodied self. Pe ople come increasing ly to perceive themselves

as separate, detached and different from others as well as developing a greater degree of re¯exivity

about their bodies.31

All three processes Ð of socialization, rationalization and individualization Ð

involved in the development of the civilized body in early modernity were essential to theelaboration of social distinctions and differentiations which occurred throughout the transforma-

tions of so cial structure ch arac teristic of the period.

Elias argues that these processes, and the distinctions which they generated, exemplify how all

civilizing processes produce civilizations through speci®c transformations of human behaviour.32

He places the emergence of the sense of civility characteristic of early modern Europe at the

pu blication, in 15 30, of Erasmus of Rotterdam ’s De civilitate morum puerilium . The `book is

about ¼ the behaviour of people in society Ð above all, but not solely, ªoutward bodily pro-

pr iet yº ¼ dedica ted to ¼ a pr ince’s son and written fo r the instruction of bo ys’, and is concerned

with all aspects of self-presentation Ð bodily carriage, gestures, dress, facial expressions, manners,

pe rsonal hygien e Ð as expressions of the inner self-consciousness of the person and thus as

in¯uences on their potential capacities for social interaction.33

Erasmus’s was a particularly

successful example of a genre, widespread at this time, of books on manners and etiquette, many

of which also contained both the music and basic steps of the major contemporary court dances,34

a clear indication of the signi®cance of dance as a display of the corporeal control required as a

mark of social distinction in early modernity. Erasmus’s treatise was translated for publication into

English in 1532, but not until there had already appeared, in 1531, a comparable work from an

english contemporary, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor .

29. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, p. 131.

30. Kuzmics, `Civilization, State and Bourgeois Society’, p. 523.

31. C. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, Lo ndon, 1993, pp. 163±67.

32. Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 42±47.

33. Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 44.

34. P. Filmer, `Embo diment and Civility’; M. Franko, `Renaissance Conduct Literature and the Basse Danse:

The Ki nesis of Bonne Grac e’ in R. C. Trex ler (ed.) , Persons in Groups: Social Behavior and Identity Formationin Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Binghamton NY , 1985, and The Dancing Body, 1986; W. Sorrell, Dance

in its Time , New York, 1981.


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Elyot: The `Good Order’ Of Dancing And The Education Of The Republican Ruler

Elyot’s treatise stands out among renaissance compendia on manners for its coherent interrelation

of political theory with moral philosophy and educational practice. Dedicating the work with

shrewd fulsomeness to Henry VIII, whose court had mixed the traditional aristocracy with the elite

of the new mercantile bourgeoisie, Elyot sets out to address the problems of government òf a

pu blic we al ¼ called in La tin Respub lic a’.35

He proposes that the modern republic should have asingle sovereign and absolute governor and, amongst its population, people who should `have

authority in the public weal’. The Book Named the Governor is intended as a resource from which

to co nstruct a progra mme of ed ucation for these peop le. Am ongst the provision that Elyot makes,

are a lengthy section on resources for the development and control of the body, Òf sundry forms

of exercise necessary for a gentleman.’

Following ®fteenth-century Italian humanist practice, Elyot recommen ds riding, hunting and

archery, and adds the newly developed game of tennis; even sedentary games, such as cards and

chess, though not dice (`that devilish merchandise’), are approved. Indeed, and perhaps ironically

from the signi®cance of the crowd in late modernity, only one exercise is `to be utterly

abjected ¼ football, wherein is nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence; whereof proceedeth

hu rt, and co nsequently rancour and malice do remain wi th them that be wo unde d;therefore it is to

be put in perpetual silence.’36

Elyot’s principal focus in his discussion of exercise, however, is dancing Ð à rare and singular

pleasure , with also go od learning in things not yet common ly known in our vu lgar’3 7

Ð a coverage

extensive enough to suggest that Elyot sees dancing as the most important of the exercises required

by the education of a gentleman. It suggests, also, that in adopting dancing, ruling groups in

England are different from the European courts of the time, where there had occurred a gradual

withdrawal of the increasingly powerful rulers of the renaissance city states from active civic and

po lit ical life. This wa s one wa y in which the rulers sought to differentia te them selves from the

increasing status of their own courtiers and the growing power and mercantile wealth of the

emerging bourgeoisie. For such groups, the ability to perform social dance came to be seen as a

source of status in emulation of the practices of the court.38

In England, by contrast, the political

ambitions of the mercantile bourgeoisie had been partially satis®ed by their successful integration

into the administration of the Tudor state. The relative cultural isolation of England in the early

modern period also affected the rates of incidence and the forms of its experience of other social,

economic and political changes.3 9

Elyot uses learning to dance as training in techniques of self-containment and -control and as

a way, thereby, to provide an epistemological allegory for the civility required of the new socialorder of early modern England.

40He establishes epistemological authority for the educational

signi®cance of dance by proposing that it is a means of coordinating the practical actions of the

dancing individuals which enables them to know allegorically the new ways of relating to others

that struct ure the changing social wo rld. Th is is essential to his recom mendation of `the good order

of dancing’ as an essentially, and originary social activity:

It is diligently to be noted that the associating of man and woman in dancing, they both

observing one number and time in their movings, was not begun without a special

consideration, as well for the intimation of sundry virtues which be by them repre-

sented ¼ as by the association of a man and a woman in dancing may be signi®ed

matrimony ¼ declaring the dignity and commodity of that sacrament ¼ In every dance,

of a most ancient custom, there danceth together a man and a woman, holding each other

by the hand or the arm, which betokeneth concord.4 1

35. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (1531), ed. S.E. Lehmberg, London, 1962, p. ix.

36. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, pp. 90±92.

37. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, p. 69.

38. Sparti, `The Function and Status of Dance’, pp. 48±51.

39. A. Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism , Oxford, 1987.40. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, p. 87.



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This links the perform ance of dance to the differentia tions of gend er and the so cia l str ucture of

po st-feudal estates to the new po litical order of the time an d its continuity wi th moral and social

tradition , for the personage s of man and woman da ncing, do express or set out the ®g ure of very

no bility; `which in the higher estate it is contained , the more excellent is the virtue in estim ation.’42

Th e allegorical role of dancing, for bo th da ncers an d spectators, is to educ ate them in the `®rst

moral virtue, called prudence’ whose commodiousness enables the elaboration of all the other

virtues as branches of it. These are: honour, maturity, providence, industry, circumspection,

election, experience and modesty; and each of them are explicated in detail by Elyot in terms of

their re¯exive relation to the mov em en ts of the ba sse da nce.43

Elyot’s description of these

movements, thus, uses the courtly ritual of the basse dance as a literal embodiment of the moral

order which will legitimate the new social and political order. Social dancing also appears to have

been an effective way of contributing to the civilizing of the body and, thus, of integrating the

individuals into membership of new social structures. The ordered exercise required in learning to

dance provides a training in increased physical self-control, and the social character of performing

the dances, wh ich were couple dances and we re wa tched as spectacles, constitute a change in the

expressive character of embodiment characterised by social consensuality. It may also be that therole of spectator, which emerged at this time in courtly dancing, alongside that of participant, both

re¯ects and pre®gures the relative passivity of modern citizens.44

Locke: Citizenship As The Embodiment Of Rational Political Individualism

Locke’s concept of the citizen is tied to two central features of his political philosophy: its

individualism and its consequent commitment to the absolute necessity for political action to be

rational. Locke argues that individuals consent to provide government with the right and the means

to act for them and to constrain them . This enables him to ex plain how they put themse lves un der a moral obligation to obey the law

45, as well as to reject the absolutist positions of his

pr edecessors, Sir Robe rt Filmer 46

and Thomas Hobbes4 7

, each of whom argued in different ways

that the state wa s the source an d end of m oral and politic al au thority. All three theorists argued

from a version of the state of nature, from which they inferred a condition of natural law on which

to model the co nstitutional law of civil society. For Ho bbes, the natural condition of human beings

was a state of nature, which, without the absolute authority of civil government, was `a war of each

against all’ in which life was `poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Human beings were driven by sel®sh

instincts to pursue exclusively their own interests, with neither reference to, nor respect for, the

interests or welfare of others. Political obligation was de®ned by government, and the responsibil-

ities of citizenship were premised on absolute obedience to governmental rule, through which civic

rights were to be legislated. For Filmer, the natural human condition was that of the patriarchal

family and government consisted of monarchical rule by divine right of inheritance. The governed,

thus , we re analogou s to children , subject naturally to the preordaine d rule of the father. Th e

continuities of this early modern theory of government with that of the second feudal age in

Europe are clear, as is that of the claim for the necessity of absolute rule in Hobbes. Locke’s

arguments for rational political individualism differ from both in challenging alike pre-ordained

and absolutist grounds for political governmental authority, and in doing so provides the basis for

a new political philosophy for early modernity.

Hobbes justi®es political absolutism on the grounds that it is the only rational way in which to

constrain human beings to f ul®l their most fundamental obligation: to preserve their own life. His

view of the natural human condition meant that individuals could not accomplish this without a

civil government with the absolute power, if necessary, to coerce them into doing so. Locke shares


43. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, pp. 80±87; Filmer, `Embodiment and Civility’, p p. 9±11.

44. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, p. 165.

45. J. Steinberg, Locke, Rousseau and the Idea of Consent , Westport CT, 1978, p. 53.

46. R. Filmer, Patriarcha and other Writings, ed. J. P. Somerville, Cam bridge, 1991.47. T. Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forms, and P ower of a C ommonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil , ed.

C. B. Macpherson, Harmondsworth, 19 75.


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Hobbes’s view that human beings have a primary responsibility to preserve their life, but his view

of their natural condition is one in which they are able to act as they choose within natural law,

which holds for all individuals. The character of natural law for Locke is reason itself, which

`teaches all ¼ who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm

another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions’48

Ð the complete antithesis of Hobbesian

instinctual egocentrism. The ideal, which this implies, of a liberal polity, is quali®ed by Locke’s

experiential awareness that not all individuals in the state of nature do consult reason, which brings

about the necessity for civil government, but of a radically different kind from either the

absolutism of Hobbes or the patriarchalism of Filmer, and with correlative differences in the

concept of the citizen which follows from it.

For Ho bbes an d Filmer, reason was em bodied solely in the ruler. Whether an individua l or an

assembly, only the sovereign governor was assumed and required to be capable of rational action;

in a sense, the position of a sovereign’s subjects was de®ned by their lack of reason. Locke

insisted, by contrast, that people in general were capable of rational action. The potential ability

of all political agents to exercise reason is integral to his account of government, and thus his

po lit ical theory required that he show , in principle, that ratio nal cond uct in general was feasiblein, and as a condition of civil society.

It was the responsibility of parents to raise their children to this condition, and the manner in

which they were to be educated as citizens was thus central to his political philosophy.49

It would

be dif®cult to overestimate the signi®cance for its time of Locke’s concept of education in rational

civility. Although he was not alone in developing ideas on a modern education,5 0

most of his

contemporaries were preoccupied with the development of theories and codes of moral education

for the burgeoning middle classes which remained grounded in Christian faith in the face of

growing philosophical humanism. The signi®cance of Locke’s work lies, in important respects, in

its concern that the task of education is to inculcate rationality as the elective basis for human action, in order that a liberal democratic form of sustainable representative and republican

government could be established for modernity. The central purpose of Locke’s discussion of

education centres on a long-established debate on civility, a contemporary version of which he had

examined in detail in the course of translating from the French some essays of Pierre Nicole.51

Th ese ha d been pu blished or iginally in 16 70 and we re , like Elyo t’s study, on the educatio n of

thos e wh o woul d be expected to partic ipate in govern ment. The essays which Lock e se lec ted for

translation focused on human we akness, arguing that peop le we re motivated in their actio ns

pr imarily by a desire for the ap proval of othe rs.

This provided Nicole with a ba sis for argu ing that civility wa s a duty, since to treat others with

consideration and good manners gave them pleasure, and thus made it possible to live with them

in peace Ð a necessary condition, according to Locke, for discharging the individual’s fundamental

responsibility to preserve their own life. However, Nicole argued also that civility was, for the

most part, ethically worthless, since it was motivated by a concern for esteem rather than by a

good disposition or an intention to perform worthwhile actions. It was with this latter feature of

Nicole’s argument that Locke came to differ and which provided the central thrust of his argument

in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which was ®rst published in 1693. Though less well

known than An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ,52

which had been published three years

earlier in 1690, it seems clear that Locke worked simultaneously on both studies whilst in exile

in Holland between 1683 and 1689,5 3 and this can be seen from the relation between them,

no twithstanding the difference between their respective prov enances. Th e Essay ¼ resulted from

pr olonged and critical re¯e ction on th e wo rk of his major im mediate predecessors an d contem po-

raries and proposed empiricism as the basis of epistemology, on the grounds that knowledge comes

48. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government , ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge, 1967, p. 311.

49. Locke, Two Treatises of Government , p. 323; Harris, The Mind of J ohn Locke: A Study of P olitical Theory

in its Intellectual Setting , Cambridge, 1994, p. 231.

50. I. Harris, The Mind of John Locke , p. 287.

51. P. Nicole, Discourses, trans. John Locke, London, 1828.52. J. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding , ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford, 1975.

53. P. Gay, John Locke on Education , New York, 1964, pp. v, 1.


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from experience, not dogma. The Thoughts originated in a series of letters to his friend Edward

Clark, not initially intended for publication, in response to requests for advice on how Clark should

best bring up and educate his children in the still changing social and political climate of the late

seventeenth century. In addressing the questions implied by this, however, Locke ®nds an

appropriate site for addressing the pedagogical issues involved in operationalising the experiential,

empiricist epistemology that he has formulated at length in the Essay, and which will provide a

basis for the theories of education of later enlightenment thinkers Ð in particular Rousseau, Voltaire

and Hume.

Locke’s concern is to provide an educational programme for the structural consolidation of the

ne w, ruling mercantile middle classes through reprod uction of their culture. The Thoughts àimed

to produc e the civic minded, we ll-manne red, and so undly inform ed En glish gentleman.’54

They

commence, following Aristotle’s order,55

with bringing the body into a condition of soundness

ne cessary for wh at Lo cke terms the `princip al business’ of education, to set the mind right, that

on all occasions it may be disposed to consent to nothing but what may be suitable to the dignity

and excellency of a rational creature.5 6

For ò ne that wi ll make any ®gure in the wo rld’ must have à stro ng co nstitution, able to endure ha rdships and fatigue.’

57 This ca n be achieved by observing these few and easily ob servable ru les.

`Plenty of open air, exercise, and sleep; plain diet, no wine or strong drink, and very little or no

ph ysic; not too warm an d stra it clothing; especially the he ad and feet kept cold, and the feet often

used to cold water and exposed to wet.’58

But these are not the most signi®cant of Locke’s prescriptions for the future citizen’s body. In

the tradition of such predecessors as Ca stiglione5 9

as well as Elyot,60

he prov ides for the

development of skills of corporeal expression as an indication of the state of an individual’s

consciousness and, by implication, his sociality. Locke’s term for this is gracefulness, a condition

which he characterizes variously,

but always as arising from that natural coherence, which appears between the thing done,

and such a temper of mind, as cannot but be approved of as suitable to the occa-

sion ¼ The actions, which naturally ¯ow from such a well-formed mind, please us also,

as the genuine marks of it ¼ that beauty, which shines through some men’s actions, sets

off all that they do, and takes with all they come near; when by a constant practice they

have fashione d their carriage, and made all those li ttle expressions of civility and

respect ¼ so easy to themselves, that they seem not arti®cial or studied, but naturally to

follow from a sweetness of mind and a well-turned disposition.’ 61

Th is condition is further de lin eated by contrast with other forms of co rporeal self-pres entation:

affectation, àrti®cial ungracefulness and such studied ways of being ill-fashioned’ and `plain and

rough nature’.6 2

Locke’s formulation of affectation echoes that of Castiglione,63

referring to it as

àn awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that

accompanies what is natural; because there is always a disagreement between the outward action,

and the mind within.’64

`Plain and rough nature’ represents an authenticity comparable to

gracefulness, but lacking cultivation, which

54. Gay, John Locke on Education, p. 6.

55. Harris, The Mind of John Locke, p. 284.

56. J. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , ed. J.W. & J.S. Yolton, Oxford, 1989, para. 31.

57. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 3.


59. B. Castiglione, The Courtier(1528), trans. with an introduction by George Bull, Harmondsworth, 1967.

60. Elyot, The Book Named the Governor.


62. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 66.63. Castiglione, The Courtier, p. 68.



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left to itself, is much better than an arti®cial ungracefulness, and such studied ways of

being ill-fashioned. The want of an accomplishment, or some defect in our behaviour,

coming short of the utmost gracefulness, often escapes observation and censure. But

affectation in any part of our carriage is lighting up a candle to our defects; and never

fails to make us be taken notice of, either as wanting sense, or wanting sincerity.65

Th e key to Lo cke’s concep t of civility here is the corpor eal evidence of both sense and sinc erity,

to wh ich authenticity in phys ica l self-pres entation is essential. It is on these grounds that he

identi®es dance as an important part of the future citizen’s education. For though Locke `would

no t have lit tle children muc h torm ented about punctilios, or niceties of bree ding’,66

he sugges ts that

dancing is one of the accomplishments necessary for a gentleman, `to be got by exercise, and to

which time is to be allowed ¼ being that which gives graceful motions all the life, and above all

things, manliness and a be coming con® dence.’67

Corporeal authenticity can be learnt from a good dancing master who: `can teach, what is

graceful and becoming, and what gives a freedom and easiness to all the m otions of the body. One

that teaches not this, is wo rse than no ne at all; na tural unfa shion ableness be ing much better than apish, affected postures; and I think it much more passable to put off the hat, and make a leg, like

an honest country gentleman’.68

Authenticity in self-presentation, though it can be found in rustic plainness, is epitomised by

that de ce ncy and gracefuln ess of looks, vo ice, words, m otions, ge stu res, and of all the

whole outward demeanour, which ¼ is ¼ the language, whereby ¼ internal civility of

the mind is expressed ¼ learned chie¯y from observ ati on, and the carriage of those wh o

are allowed to be exactly well-bred.69

Th is language of the body which expresse s internal civility is de sign ed to de monstrate to others

the accom plished ration ality of the individua l, since it demon strates `virtue as the ®rst and most

ne cessary of those endow ments that belong to a man or a ge ntleman, as absolutely requisite to

make him valued and beloved by others, acceptable or tolerable to himself.’70

Virtue is achieved, for Locke, by the individual always electing to follow reason rather than

desire whenever the two con¯ict, and thus differentiating his concept of human ontology from that

of Hobbes, who considered such an election beyond the reach of the majority of people and thus

ne cessitated absolute sovereign po lit ical authority . It is, uneq uivoc ally, hu man rationality wh ich

makes the individual civil for Locke, since

He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the

importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is ®t to be

done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry; and is in danger of never being

good for anything.71

It is on this basis that Locke refutes Nicole and others amongst his contemporaries who argue that

civility is not a suf®cient ethical basis for social and political action. Civility is, for Locke,72

essentially rational since it results from subjecting individual desires and appetites to the advice

of reason and the requirements of duty. It is the product, thus, of

A mind free, and master of itself and all its actions, not low and narrow, not haughty

and insolent, not blemished with any great defect ¼ The actions, which naturally ¯ow






70. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 135.71. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 45.



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from such a well-formed mind, please us also, as ¼ natural emanations from the spirit

and disposition within ¼ easy and unconstrained.73

Corporeal civility, for Locke, enables the individual `under the inoffensive guard of a civil and

obliging carriage, (to) keep himself free and safe in his conversation with strangers, and all sorts

of people, without forfeiting their good opinion.’7 4

And to the achievement of this, dance is

essential. The achievements of Locke’s formulation of the rational individual citizen of civilsociety for early modernity is indicated by the agenda this sets for the elaboration of liberal

po lit ical philosophy and the developm ent of subseq uent state formatio ns du ring the eighteent h and

nine teenth centuries . Hi s conc ern wi th the corporeal self-possession and -control of the politi cally

active individual, though not the most important part of his work, is nevertheless integrated with

its most signi®cant features, since, in the words with which he commences the Thoughts: `A sound

mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.’7 5

It is essential to the rationality and social acceptability of the active political individual and, in

some senses, anticipates the proliferation of physical embodiments of citizenship in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries.

76

Issues Of Embodiment Of Late Modern Citizenship

Contemporary concepts of citizenship are concerned with issues of power, inequality and social

change in emerging, post-nation-state social formations. The central issues focus on the rights and

obligations of individual citizens and the character of identity and membership in late modern

societies. All of these concerns parallel analytically those at issue for early modernity, though their

substantive character is obviously different. Discussions of late modern citizenship are tied to the

pr ocesses of globalization and focused on them es of ge ndered citiz ens hip, the inter- as we ll as

intra-societal welfare of citizens, the status of citizens in multi-cultural and culturally plural

societies, the deprivations of citizenship caused by diasporic movements and the creation of

stateless refugee populations. Yet all of these are problems of corporeal as well as political

identity, to which the conceptualisations of the embodiment of citizens in early modernity m ay be

relevant. Both Elyot and Locke sought to universalise the corporeal condition of active citizen as

an empirically visible, self-evident way of representing their ®tness for civic responsibility and

po lit ical authority : the civility of the bo dy epitom ised the rational sociality of the individua l. Social

dancing demonstrated the achievement of these qualities by representing both the elemental

socialities accomplished through muscular bonding and the complex differentiations of the social

structural positions of individuals and groups in relation to each other.

The conc eptualisation of citizenship in late mod ernity is no t ch aracteris ed by a search for a

universalisable, `global’ civic status, despite the erosion of the nation-state as a societal formation.

Th e co mplexity an d scale of late-industr ial societies is in part a result of the diff erentiation of

identity criteria of individuals that has resulted from the continuing elaborations of the s ocial

division of labour and the functional democratization of the modern state. Political and economic

interests have proliferated across nation-state boundaries and are re¯exively interrelated with the

increasing differentiation of shared norms and values into sub-cultures which are themselves made

po ssible by the industrialisation of transport and the globalisa tion of electronic commun ications.

Th ese conditions no t on ly generate the problematics of contemporary citizenship: in effect theyde®ne its sociological character. One clear difference from the corporeal citizenship of early

modernity is in the relative lack of opportunities for muscular bonding through keeping together

in time. There has been an intensi®cation of passive over active bodily experience in all spheres

of human activity, of which the industrialisation and clericalisation of work, the privatisation and

reduction to relatively passive spectatorship of much of leisure are only the most frequently cited

instances. The speci®c character of social dancing, for example, which provided `such an

73. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 66

74. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 21475. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education , para. 1

76. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, pp . 137±49


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important cement for human c ommunities in times past’77

has itself become a su bcultural activity,

the most predom inant forms of wh ich, ov er the pa st half-centur y, are more co ncerned with

enabling individuals to m ove separately rather than together in t ime, though they continue to take

place for the most part in so cial co ntexts. Ho weve r muscular in execution club rave danc ing might

be, it does not provide an occasion for social bonding. The restoration of opportunities for active

pa rti cipa tion in rhythm ic muscular social bo nding by keeping together in time may be the principal

challenge in attempting to reconceptualise the embodied citizen at the contemporary stage of the

civilizing process.

Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, London PAU L FIL ME R

77. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, p. 152.


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embodying citizenship in early modernity

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